Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [112]
6. Then Who had stood upright, from his position crouched next to the Doctor, and spoken a single word. Even Lisa-Beth doesn’t have the nerve to record it. She simply writes, ‘_____’. And this is followed by a single English word: arrival.
It’s from this point on that the TARDIS becomes a physical entity in the accounts, not just some mythical ‘White Hart’. It’s a massive, haunting presence, which had come tumbling right out of the horizon towards Sabbath’s vessel.
What’s most notable about Lisa-Beth’s notes, given the ongoing themes of blooding and sacrifice, is her description of the Doctor. The Doctor had fallen to his knees as if in supplication. And there’s one telling phrase that Lisa-Beth uses. She says that when he looked up with his hand on his chest – the right side, so she assumes he hadn’t been touching his heart – he ‘looked ready to give himself up to the v[astness, vagaries?] of time around him’. It was as if the Doctor had been making some deal with the elemental forces, or at least offering himself up. After all, it wasn’t simply for his own sake that he wanted his TARDIS back. He believed that the box’s presence on the troubled planet would help stabilise the entire world. Often, when the Doctor would suffer attacks of his unknown and unexplained illness, he would be seen clutching his chest in exactly the same fashion.
What, though, was wrong with the Doctor? Even apart from the fact that the wrong side of his chest was affected, simple heart problems seem an unlikely explanation. They’d hardly account for the ‘black bile’ described by Scarlette. In the latter part of October, as many physicians would attend the Doctor as would later attend George III during his madness, and with similarly vague results. The Doctor, almost humouring the men, would allow himself to be bled, prodded, even half-poisoned in the name of medical science. Nobody would ever produce any answers. Those who liked to mock Scarlette’s coven now wondered if the wedding would now go ahead with no bride and no groom either.
Tales from the White Room
The first of the wedding guests arrived six weeks early. Since the start of October they’d been circling St Belique, but perhaps not surprisingly it was the American who made the first move.
The man’s name was Mr Van Burgh. He was a tall, pale gentleman of Virginia, with a drawl that people often found hard to place (Van Burgh wasn’t a typical Virginian name, some noted), who never spoke the name of Matthew Crane but whose connections were never questioned. As stately as they came, in the days that followed he’d often be seen skirting the forestlands of the island with his walking-cane in hand and his black jacket pulled tight around him, pushing aside the poisonous machineel-stalks as if this were no different from a stroll in the fields of home. It was October 20 when he first arrived at the Church and introduced himself to Who. Van Burgh spent a while inspecting the vault, his face not showing either approval or disapproval. Observers noted that he wore a cross around his neck, yet although he often mentioned God those who met him didn’t feel he was talking about a truly Protestant deity. The bottom of the cross was sharpened to a wooden point, which later made some of the other guests think of the great spiked crosses that the Virginian cabal had hammered into the earth, designed to cut into the veins (so it was said) of the ancient sleeping things which had once been worshipped by the Indians.
Van Burgh never spoke of any of these matters. He declared himself to be a man of the enlightenment, a man of reason.